William Rea Keast (November 1, 1914 – June 27, 1998) was an American scholar and academic administrator who served as president of Wayne State University from 1965 to 1971.
At Cornell, he became the chair of the Department of English in 1957, was named dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1962, and vice president for academic affairs in 1964.
While at Cornell, he spent two years in England where he worked on his edition of Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets.
Keast was an authority on 18th Century English Literature,[4] and an important contributor to the Chicago School of literary criticism.
He presided over Wayne State during a period of campus unrest in the late 1960s, during which he came under pressure from the Wayne State Board of Governors to clamp down on anti-war and other campus demonstrations, and to regulate the student newspaper, the name of which and editorial policies had been radically changed by students.
Student enrollment increased from fewer that 30,000 to more than 35,000; general fund expenditures increased from $34 million to nearly $70 million; major buildings were constructed, including the Law School, Matthaei Physical Education complex, Physics Building and the Palmer Avenue Parking Structure; and new programs were established, including the Center for Urban Studies and the Commission on the Status of Women.
[9] After resigning from Wayne State, Keast then served as chair of the Commission on Academic Tenure in Higher Education in Washington, D.C., and later joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as chairman of the English Department and Director of Special Library Collections, and remained until his retirement in 1980.
"The Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language: Johnson’s Revisions and the Establishment of the Text," Studies in Bibliography, V (1952–53), 129-46.
"Johnson as a Subscriber" with J. D. Fleeman and Donald Eddy, Johnsonian News Letter, XXV (December 1965), 2-3.
"Samuel Johnson and Thomas Maurice," Eighteenth-Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, ed.